Past Conference Materials

Critical Ethnic Studies Association is excited to announce our third major conference, Sovereignties and Colonialisms: Resisting Racism, Extraction and Dispossession. This gathering will honour Indigenous sovereignty struggles for land, culture, food, water, education, and health—and centre Indigenous, Black, and people of colour activism and scholarship, especially work coming from feminist, trans, Two-Spirit, queer, and disability struggles and perspectives.

Sovereignities and Colonialisms aims to critique settler colonialism and white supremacy; challenge colonial gender binaries; examine genealogies of anti-Black racism and colonial racial formations; and think about resistance and oppression transnationally, in ways that challenge western hegemony and the travels of racist and colonial methods.

Hosted by: The Institute For Research on Race and Public Policy
The University of Illinois At Chicago

Conference Description:
Interrogating the limitations of ethnic studies today and counteracting these appropriations, CESA’s second conference has as its central goal the development of an approach to scholarship, institution building, and activism that is animated by the spirit of the decolonial, antiracist, and other global liberationist movements that enabled the creation of Ethnic Studies (Asian American Studies, Black Studies, Native American Studies, Arab-American Studies, Latino/a Studies, and Postcolonial Studies) and continues to inform its political and intellectual projects. An un-disciplinary formation, critical ethnic studies has decolonization not as its goal but sees decolonizing as a set of ongoing theories, practices, imaginaries, and methods in the service of abolishing global oppression. Thus, rather than focusing exclusively on critique, critical ethnic studies stands for decolonizing as a generative praxis of world-making.

March 10-12, 2011

Hosted by: Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California at Riverside

Conference Description:

Ethnic studies scholarship has laid the crucial foundation for analyzing the intersections of racism, colonialism, immigration, and slavery within the context of the United States. Yet it has become clear that ethnic studies paradigms have become entrapped within, and sometimes indistinguishable from, the discourse and mandate of liberal multiculturalism, which relies on a politics of identity representation diluted and domesticated by nation-building and capitalist imperatives. Interrogating the strictures in which ethnic studies finds itself today, this conference calls for the development of critical ethnic studies. Far from advocating the peremptory dismissal of identity, this conference seeks to structure inquiry around the logics of white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy in order to expand the scope of ethnic studies. An interdisciplinary or even un-disciplinary formation, critical ethnic studies engages with the logics that structure society in its entirety. As ethnic studies has become more legitimized within the academy, it has frequently done so by distancing itself from the very social movements that helped to launch the field in the first place. Irrefutable as the evidence is of the university's enmeshment with governmental and corporate structures, the trend in ethnic studies has been to neutralize the university rather than to interrogate it as a site that transforms ideas into ideology. While this conference does not propose to romanticize these movements or to prescribe a specific relationship that academics should have with them, we seek to call into question the emphasis on professionalization within ethnic studies and the concomitant refusal to interrogate the politics of the academic industrial complex or to engage with larger movements for social transformation.